Sancha Simpson-Davis - 1990 - 1997

Life As A Medical Student

Life as a medical student is a necessary pre-requisite to becoming a doctor!  I am now in my fifth and final year at St. George’s Hospital Medical School based at Tooting in London.  I started at medical school after a Gap Year which I spent in Tanzania.  Medical schools are generally supportive of people who want to defer entry, but most people come directly from A-level studies.  There are also lots of mature students and overseas students on my course and the new four year Graduate Entry Programme has broadened the intake of medical students.

My degree course has been newly reorganized, so that we learn in systems (for example the respiratory system) rather than subjects (like anatomy, physiology etc).  A proportion of the course is self-directed problem-based learning, where a group of students get together and are given a story about a patient.  Then as a group they identify what issues need to be researched and come back the following week with the information to share with the group.  The first two years of the course are more or less pre-clinical lecture based with some patient contact.  There are exams at the end of every term with big exams in the summer, which have to be passed to proceed into the next year.  After pre-clinicals some people choose to intercalate and do an extra year to get a BSc degree.

The fun really begins in the third year when you are let loose on patients.  We rotate through different specialties usually spending five weeks with a “firm” (a team of doctors including house officers, senior house officers, a registrar and a consultant who are responsible for the care of around 10 - 30 inpatients).  Generally we are expected to “clerk” patients (that means talk to them and then examine them), attend theatre sessions and outpatient clinics, go on ward rounds with the team and have bedside teaching from the doctors.  The “firm” is usually based in casualty one day a week and is responsible for admitting patients into hospital.  This is a great chance for students to see very sick patients, to do practical procedures (like taking blood) and sometimes to be the first to “clerk” them.  Our hospital experience is supplemented by lectures and small group tutorials.

In the third and fourth years we learn about numerous specialties including general medicine, general surgery, eyes, skin, orthopaedics and rheumatology (bones and joints), neurology (nerves), psychiatry (mad people), obstetrics and gynaecology (delivering babies and women’s naughty bits), paediatrics (screaming kids), care of the elderly, general practice….the list goes on and on.  As you can imagine it is a whirlwind doing five weeks of each and then moving onto the next, and most of the time it is jolly hard work.  Most days are at least nine til five, with a bit of reading at home in the evenings.  I have forgotten to mention the social life…the old adage work hard and play hard very definitely applies!

At the end of the fourth year we do written finals and our fifth year is billed as “intensive clinical experience”.  This actually means fewer lectures and interesting attachments including anaesthetics (making people go off to sleep), accident and emergency medicine, general practice again and then ten weeks to do an “elective” – anything you want as long as its related to medicine, anywhere in the world. 

Currently I am doing “shadow house officer” posts, which are exactly that.  I am following round the new doctors doing their job so that I know what I am doing when I start as a new doctor myself.  There is a lot of opportunity to practice my skills at practical procedures and brush up on things I have forgotten.  Now my clinical finals are only ten weeks away and I am quite frightened, but I am assured most people do pass as long as they have worked hard.

If you are thinking of becoming a doctor make sure you are 100% certain it is what you want to do.  There are lots of really exciting opportunities and a fantastic career structure to keep you interested for a lifetime.  I highly recommend having a flick through a book called “So you want to be a brain surgeon?” by Chris Ward and Simon Eccles (ISBN 0192630962) to find out more about career paths open to doctors.

Life as a doctor is tough and the university course reflects this.  Make sure you get good work experience and have plenty of outside interests (as well as the predicted grades) before you apply to uni.  Choose your university carefully as you will spend a lot of time there.  Talk to current students, get the prospectus, go to open days, look around the hospital and the surrounding area.  Apply early through UCAS and get some interview practice before the big day.  And remember, actually you don’t need the intellect of Einstein, just the memory of an elephant and the stubbornness of a donkey!  GOOD LUCK